Let’s Fix Probation

UNISON’s ‘Let’s Fix Probation Campaign’ aims to see the Probation Service taken out of civil service control and restored as a locally managed service, as was the case prior to Chris Grayling’s disastrous Transforming Rehabilitation reforms. Before 2014, probation was a successful, award winning service run by 35 independent Probation Trusts, each managed by a Chief Probation Officer, with the same boundaries as police forces. Given the concerns over the failure of centralisation, the Labour Party promised a review the governance of probation in its 2024 election manifesto. UNISON is pressing for this review to take place sooner rather than later.

UNISON probation members come to work every day to give their best to people on probation, victims and the communities they serve, but are being held back by a centralised, inflexible HMPPS bureaucracy which simply cannot manage what is at heart a local community service, or engage effectively with local statutory partners. This has to change.

Read our ‘Let’s Fix Probation’ campaign leaflet here which sets out 10 reasons why the civil service is not capable of running probation.